Author Archives: Rose Lerner

About Rose Lerner

A geek of both the history-and-English and the Star-Trek variety, Rose writes Regency romance with strong heroines and adorable heroes. Her most recent books are Listen to the Moon (book three in her Lively St. Lemeston series, about a very proper valet and a snarky maid-of-all-work who marry to get a plum job) and a novella about an architect and a gaming den hostess in Gambled Away, a gambling-themed anthology with Molly O'Keefe, Joanna Bourne, Jeannie Lin, and Isabel Cooper.

That which we call a historical romance hero by any other name would smell like sandalwood and MAN

Updated on May 25, 2015 by Rose Lerner

Naming characters has been on my mind recently. I’ve been cleaning up and doing the first round of beta revisions on the next Lively St. Lemeston book, and I always leave a lot of names of secondary characters to be finalized at the end. I’m also planning my next project, a novella for an anthology, so I’m choosing names for my central characters.

I take names very seriously, especially for heroes and heroines. I was on a writing date with a friend, working for hours, and I think she was a little taken aback to realize I was thrilled to have finalized three names! What can I say, I’m picky about names. Plus, the heroine and her best friend in the novella are both not originally from England, which means tracking down a different set of naming resources than I usually use.

So I thought today I’d share some of my favorite naming resources, plus the fruits of my recent research.

Resources, England:

The Guiness Book of Names by Leslie Dunkling includes lists of the top fifty first names for girls and boys in England and Wales for 1700 and 1800. I figure names on either list are fair game.

Homes of Family Names in Great Britain by Henry Brougham Guppy (possessor of an amazing name himself), 1890, includes lists of English last names organized by county, sometimes with notes on their origin. I love this book so much I had it printed and bound at the Third Place Books espresso book machine. Did I mention organized by county?

I stole this trick from Cecilia Grant: Debrett’s Baronetage of England, 1835, is a great place to find first and last names that I can be sure are appropriate for an aristocratic character.

When I’m choosing a title rather than a last name (e.g., the Earl of Tassell), I sometimes go with a last name, and sometimes with a place name. The Guiness Book of Names, mentioned above, has a lot of great place names in it, plus building blocks for creating your own. Wikipedia also provides lists of villages in UK counties. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Villages_in_West_Sussex

Genealogy sites are an amazing resource, and you can often find them for other countries, too! My favorite for Regency England is this Genes Reunited database of England and Wales death records from 1837 forward. Here’s a search for the name Clementia limited to people born between 1770 and 1790. As you can see it is great at recognizing related names, too!

Resources, Not England:

The thing about naming characters from other countries and cultures is that I don’t have intuition about the name. Even when I was naming the Jewish characters in True Pretenses, I discovered that Ashkenazi Jewish surnames (very familiar to me in their modern form) were completely different during the Regency. So I only chose last names that actually appeared in my research books, and I did the same for some first names (though not all–a couple of people who are only briefly mentioned have common Yiddish or Ladino names that I just hope were in use at the time, like Faige and Speranza). Obviously that provides less options, but I really didn’t want to fuck it up.

I followed the same method for naming an Indian secondary character/future heroine in my upcoming book, although I’m still hoping to find more good online resources for this before I write her book and have to choose dozens of names.

(For a good start at understanding the complexities of naming an Indian character without accidentally mixing and matching religion, location, caste &c., check out these tips from Alisha Rai and Suleikha Snyder. You can see them walking someone through the naming process too! Of course, that’s not even getting into whether the name was used in a particular time period.)

For naming the heroine of my novella, who was born in Portugal, I started with Behind the Name’s list of Portuguese girls’ names. Once I had a shortlist of names I liked, I tested their historicity by plugging them into this FamilySearch database of Portugal Catholic baptisms 1570-1910. (Obviously this only works for Catholic names!)

The name I eventually chose: Magdalena Da Silva. She goes by Maggie.

For naming her best friend (with benefits), I found this amazing database of eighteenth century Dutch Ashkenazi Jews (organized in lists alphabetically by surname which makes it fantabulously usable for my purposes). His name: Meyer Hennipzeel. He goes by Meyer Henney in England.

While paging through Debrett’s for my hero (eventually named Simon Radcliffe-Gould), I discovered some marvelous things.

Debrett’s contains a list of baronet family mottoes. I haven’t had time to go through it fully but my favorite on the first page is “Agitatione purgator. Cleansed by agitation. Russell, of Middlesex.”

I found a couple of family crests worthy of Monty Python. The Acton family, of Aldenham Hall, Shropshire, are represented by “A human leg and thigh in armour, couped, and dropping blood, all proper, garnished, or.” [Image]

And the Prices of Treggwainton, Cornwall, use “On a wreath of the colours a dragon’s head vert, erased gules, holding in its mouth a sinister hand erect, couped, dropping blood from the wrist, all proper.” [Image–and look, you can buy a set of Georgian silver dessert spoons with this crest on it!]

And of course, names:

Buckworth-Herne-Soames
Dalrymple-Horn-Elphinstone
Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone
Philadelphia-Letitia Cotton
Sir Peter Parker

And my absolute favorite…

…the Page-Turners! YES. There was an actual family named the Page-Turners. I want to name my hero this so badly, I can’t even tell you. I know it would be distracting but it’s SO FUNNY. I don’t think I would ever get tired of it.

Sir Gregory Page-Turner (1748–1805). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

This guy is a babe, I have to say. I also enjoyed this tidbit about his life:

“Sir Edward Turner, 2nd Baronet had a country house, Ambrosden House, built by the architect Sanderson Miller in the 1740s. Sir Gregory never lived at Ambrosden, thought the house too big and in 1767 sought to demolish part of it to make it smaller. This proved impractical so in 1768 he had the entire house demolished.”

Do you have a favorite historical name you’d like to see in a book? How about a favorite name resource?

ETA: Joanna Bourne alerted me to this, for late 18th-century French names: The Guillotined. So cool!

Posted in Names, Research | 20 Replies

“‘Pickles’ left behind”

Updated on April 27, 2015 by Rose Lerner

Two weeks ago, I finally wrote “The End” on the rough draft of my next book, Listen to the Moon, out in January. (It’s book 3 in my Lively St. Lemeston series, starring Toogood and Sukey, the valet and maid from book 1.) Woooo!

But when I say rough, I mean ROUGH. Part of my process for going from “rough draft” to “clean draft I can send to my friends with only a minimum of shame” involves looking up a lot of words in the Oxford English Dictionary (thank god, the Seattle Public Library has a subscription) to see if they were in use during the Regency.

One word I looked up was “epergne.” I had the vague idea this was some kind of large silver thing used as a centerpiece on a dinner table. Maybe a vase? But I discovered to my surprise that it is a “centre-dish, or centre ornament for the dinner-table, now often in a branched form, each branch supporting a small dish for dessert or the like, or a vase for flowers. (From our quots. it appears that the earlier use was chiefly to hold pickles.)” !!!

The relevant quotations are:

“1761 Bill of Fare in Pennant London (1813) 562, 2 Grand Epergnes filled with fine Pickles.[…]
1804 Verses to Dr. Warton in Ann. Reg. 928 [His pupils present him with an epergne on his resigning the head-mastership of Winchester, hoping that it may remind him ‘of “Pickles” left behind’].”

[ETA: I want to clarify that this doesn’t mean epergnes were ONLY used to hold pickles. Another quotation, from 1779, mentions using one for sweetmeats. But I think the 1804 quote makes the strength of the association clear.]

Of course, this is slightly less limiting than it might sound to us—while “pickles” have come to refer primarily to pickled cucumbers, in the Regency it could mean any pickled dish. Take a look at “Pickle” in the index of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery to get an idea of the possible variety! Ox palates, red currants, walnuts, and “elder shoots in imitation of bamboo” are just a few of the most picturesque recipes.

Epergne by Thomas Pitts, London, 1761. Image credit: Daderot via Wikimedia Commons. Notice the pineapple topper! We’ll be talking more about pineapples later.

This got me thinking about other kinds of dishes with specific purposes that have passed out of fashion. A few of my favorites:

1. The seau à glace, or ice-pail, used for serving ice cream at table. Assembled, it looked like this:

Flight & Barr, Worcester, 1782-1802. Image credit: Daderot via Wikimedia Commons.

The lid is filled with ice, and the central bowl can be lifted out and the bottom of the pail filled with more ice. In this way ice cream can be kept cold on the dinner table for up to four hours (!), if salt is added to the ice. To see one in use, scroll to the bottom of Ivan Day’s wonderful page on Georgian and Victorian ice cream (and look in the left sidebar for a picture of one completely disassembled).

If you’re as charmed by this dish as I am, some helpful soul has assembled an entire Pinterest board of them, and they’re all wonderful!

2. The turtle soup tureen. “Turtle dinners,” or dinners at which turtle soup was the central dish, were a popular form of lavish entertainment in the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth.

(They were especially popular at civic celebrations like the Lord Mayor’s Feast, etc. The association was strong enough by 1834 that I came across this quotation from Blackwood’s Magazine in the OED in the entry for “swallow, v.”: “Dosy, who sate in open-mouthed wonder, swallowing them [sc. his stories] down as a common-councilman swallows turtle.”)

I also read a quote (which I can’t now dig up but I’ll give it another shot this afternoon) about one enthusiastic candidate’s wife attending five turtle dinners in a week as part of campaigning for her husband during the 1754 general election. Oy!

You can read more about this custom (and about where all the turtles came from) in this article.

(Mock turtle soup was created to cheaply imitate the fashionable delicacy. As Wikipedia says, “It often uses brains and organ meats such as calf’s head or a calf’s foot to duplicate the texture and flavour of the original’s turtle meat.” Heinz used to make a canned variety that only went out of production in the 1970s—you can see a picture of a can as well as some old recipes here.)

Anyway, special tureens were made shaped like turtles to hold the soup. I’ve seen them now and then in museums; the article linked above contains a photo of a splendid example in silver at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.

3. And possibly my favorite for sheer whimsy…the pineapple stand! The pineapple was a fad luxury item in eighteenth and early nineteenth century England in rather the way tulips were in 17th century Holland. By the Regency the initial craze, which led to things like the building of a giant stone pineapple-shaped conservatory, had passed…

The Dunmore Pineapple, built by the Earl of Dunmore in 1761. Image credit: Davidw82, via Wikimedia Commons.

…but pineapples remained a popular display of wealth and glamor. Whole pineapples were used as table centerpieces (and sometimes were taken away again by the caterers at the end of the night without being eaten!). This blog post contains two beautiful examples of porcelain pineapple stands by Spode, one from 1813 and one from 1820, with an explanation of their use. These are clearly designed for the whole pineapple to stand in the center surrounded by sliced pineapple, as is this lovely boat-shaped stand, but some, like this cut glass one…clearly are not.

Honorable mention goes to the Solomon’s Temple pudding mold, popular for nearly two centuries. You can see pictures of a variety of molds AND, incredibly, a video of the finished pudding wobbling comically, at this awesome blog post by Ivan Day, who explains, “Because it is made of flummery, which is a kind of opaque milk jelly, the central obelisk wobbles and cavorts in a most entertaining manner, while the four little cones shake, rattle and roll in a very naughty way.”

What’s your favorite single-purpose serving dish? Teapots? Salt and pepper shakers? Gravy boats? Tell me all about it!

Posted in Food, Regency | 10 Replies

Where do you get your ideas?

Updated on March 20, 2015 by Rose Lerner

My ideas come from all over, but the primary place they come from is research. Here are no less than FOUR wonderful settings or hooks for a romance that I came across just this week!

1. Humphrey Ravenscroft, inventor of the forensic wig. I came upon him while trying to decide if Regency footmen would powder their wigs, or wear wigs that were already white (my reluctant conclusion: probably powder). The website of Ede & Ravenscroft (makers of forensic wigs to this day! Here’s Freema Agyeman rocking a modern-day legal wig on Law & Order UK) informed me that in 1822, “Humphrey Ravenscroft (1748 – 1851), grandson of the founder, finally perfects and patents a wig made of white horsehair that needs no powdering or curling. This is the famous forensic wig, whose pattern is still used today.”

The patent states more fully: “for the invention of a Forensic Wig, the curls whereof are constructed upon a principle to supersede the necessity of frizzing, curling, or using hard pomatums, and for forming the Curls in a way not to be uncurled; and also for the Tails of the Wig not to require tying in dressing; and further the impossibility of any person untying them.”

The technical details of construction are included. The wig supposedly also stayed clean, didn’t smell, and could be folded and carried in a tin without damaging it!

For a picture of a period wig (although I suspect the dating is too early), here is one on Pinterest, and another one c. 1830 with some wonderful close-ups.

I would read SO MANY romances about this guy inventing his wig! And what a name.

2. A play performed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, April-May 1804, advertised as “a grand Naval spectacle, presenting that memorable monument of British Glory, the Siege of Gibralter; with an exact representation of the armament both by Land and Sea, of the combined forces of France and Spain, with real Men of War and Floating Batteries, built and rigged by professional men from His Majesty’s Dock Yards, and which float in a receptacle containing nearly 8000 cubic feet of real water.”

794px-Microcosm_of_London_Plate_069_-_Sadler's_Wells_Theatre

Sadler’s Wells Theatre putting on what looks like another aquatic spectacle c. 1808, from Rowlandson and Pugin’s Microcosm of London. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Later advertising elaborated that there were: “real ships of 100, 74, and 60 guns, &c., built, rigged, and manoeuvred in the most correct manner, as every nautical character who has seen them implicitly allows, which work down with the wind on their starboard beam, wear and haul the wind on their larboard tacks, to regain their situations, never attempted at any Theatre in this or any other country: the ships firing their broadsides, the conflagration of the town in various places, the defence of the garrison, and attack by the floating batteries, is so faithfully and naturally represented, that when the floating batteries take fire, some blowing up with a dreadful explosion, and others, after burning to the water’s edge, sink to the bottom; while the gallant Sir Roger Curtis appears in his boat to save the drowning Spaniards, the British tars for that purpose plunging into the water, the effect is such as to produce an unprecedented climax of astonishment and applause.”

(Quoted in Nicoll’s A History of English Drama.)

I can’t even begin to grasp the romantic possibilities. You’ve got set designers, engineers, military and technical advisors, everyone in the theater and its company, possible Navy men in the audience, dangerous effects and stunts…I WANT TO READ A BOOK ABOUT THIS SO BADLY.

3. “A tontine is an investment plan for raising capital, devised in the 17th century and relatively widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries. It combines features of a group annuity and a lottery. Each subscriber pays an agreed sum into the fund, and thereafter receives an annuity. As members die, their shares devolve to the other participants, and so the value of each annuity increases. On the death of the last member, the scheme is wound up. In a variant, which has provided the plot device for most fictional versions, upon the death of the penultimate member the capital passes to the last survivor.” (Wikipedia)

(I came across this because the building of the new Chichester theatre was funded by tontine in 1792, headed up by the Duke of Richmond, whom you may remember from his wife’s famous ball on the eve of Waterloo.)

OH MY GOD. There have apparently been a lot of TV episodes and murder mysteries involving tontines, but I’d never heard of it and I have CERTAINLY never seen it in a historical romance! Someone PLEASE get on that.

4. In looking something up for the online course on Regency politics I’m currently teaching, I discovered this in Judith Lewis’s Sacred to Female Patriotism:

“Donald McAdams [Rose’s note: I definitely just typed Douglas Adams]…confirms that in 1784, ‘many Bristol girls had bogus wedding ceremonies which were declared void at the close of the poll,’ while in Great Grimsby in 1790 he recounts that there were sixty weddings immediately prior to the election.”

(Bristol and Great Grimsby were boroughs where daughters of freemen could confer voting privileges on their husbands.)

Okay. OMG. Mass weddings! Bogus marriages which were quickly annuled! How was that even legally possible?? I want to know EVERYTHING. I especially want a screwball comedy–style romance about a couple who just married for the election and are planning to annul it later…except then neither of them really wants to.

Which of these would you most like to see? What historical factoid do you think would be a great subject for a romance?

Posted in Frivolity, Plot bunnies, Research | 11 Replies

To convert White Wine into Red

Updated on February 21, 2015 by Rose Lerner

Hi all! Huzzah, this is my first post as an official Risky! I am so happy to be here. 😀

The hero of my current WIP Listen to the Moon (readers of Sweet Disorder may remember him as Nick’s pun-hating valet Toogood) has recently taken a job as butler in a vicarage. Now, one of the tasks of a butler is to oversee the wine cellar. As The Complete Servant (published in 1825 by husband-and-wife butler/housekeeper duo Samuel and Sarah Adams) puts it:

The keys of the wine and ale cellars are specially kept by him, and the management of the wine, the keeping of the stock book, and also of ale in stock, or in brewing, are in his particular charge. This duty he generally performs in the morning before he is dressed to receive company, and he then brings out such wine as is wanted for the day’s use. It is his duty to fine* wine as it comes in the pipe**, and to superintend the bottling, sealing it himself, and disposing it in bins so as to know its age and character. While these duties and those of brewing are in hand, he leaves the parlour and waiting duties to the under butler and footman.

* Fining is the process of adding stuff to wine that attaches itself to unwanted particles in the wine; they can then be removed together or allowed to sink to the bottom of the keg or cask. It ensures your wine doesn’t look like this:

Photo Credit: Monica Yichoy via Wikimedia Commons.

** A pipe is a traditional English wine cask size, equal to about a hundred and twenty-five gallons, or half a tun.

I wanted to write a scene set in the wine cellar, but I know almost nothing about wine except that I like to drink it. So I checked out some of the helpful tips and recipes in The Complete Servant.

I loved the long list of equipment “To Fit up a Cellar of Wines and Spirits.” Then I tried reading some methods of fining wine.

To fine Port Wine

Take the whites and shells of eight fresh eggs, beat them in a wooden can or pail, with a whisk, till it becomes a thick froth; then add a little wine to it, and whisk it again[…]If the weather be warmish, add a pint of fresh-water sand to the finings. Stir it well about; after which put in the finings, stirring it for five minutes; put in the can of wine, leaving the bung out for a few hours, that the froth may fall: then bung it up, and in eight or ten days it will be fine and fit for bottling.

Ewwwww!

To improve White Wines

If the wine have an unpleasant taste, rack off one half; and to the remainder add a gallon of new milk, a handful of bay-salt, and as much rice; after which take a staff, beat them well together for half an hour, and fill up the cask, and when rolled well about, stillage it, and in a few days it will be much improved.

If the white wine is foul and has lost its colour, for a butt or pipe take a gallon of new milk, put it into the cask, and stir it well about with a staff; and when it has settled, put in three ounces of isinglass made into a jelly, with a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar scraped fine, and stir it well about. On the day following, bung it up, and in a few days it will be fine and have a good color.

Well. Now I was well and truly grossed out! Truly, the past is another country, I thought.

Shows what I know. While inorganic finings are also widely used these days, Wikipedia says: “The most common organic compounds used include egg whites, casein derived from milk, gelatin and isinglass obtained from the bladders of fish.”

Yes indeed. Even dried oxblood powder (a popular traditional fining for red wine) is not entirely a thing of the past. Yes, it had already mostly gone out of fashion when it was banned by the EEC in 1997 due to concerns about mad cow disease–but even after that some wineries were caught breaking the ban!

In theory, only trace amounts of finings remain in the final bottled wine. But although I could find no anecdotal evidence of folks allergic to milk having a reaction to drinking white wine, in 2007 the Scientific Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies of the European Food Safety Agency published their finding “that milk and milk products used in winemaking may trigger allergic responses”! (A helpful blog post on the subject is here.)

I think the tip that horrified me the most, though, was this one:

To convert White Wine into Red

Pour four ounces of turnesole rags* into an earthen vessel, and pour upon them a pint of boiling water; cover the vessel close, and leave it to cool; strain off the liquor, which will be of a fine deep red inclining to purple. A small portion of this colours a large quantity of wine. This tincture may either be made in brandy, or mixed with it, or else made into a syrup, with sugar, for keeping.

* “A violet-blue or purple colouring matter, obtained from the plant Crozophora tinctoria, formerly much used for colouring jellies, confectionery, wines, etc., and later as a pigment[…]Coarse linen rags are steeped in the juice, and then dried and exposed in vats over an ammoniacal mixture; hence the designation turnsole in rags.” –The Oxford English Dictionary

In those countries which do not produce the tingeing grape which affords a blood-red juice, wherewith the wines of France are often stained, in defect of this, the juice of elderberries is used, and sometimes log-wood is used at Oporto.

Now that’s just cheating.

Posted in Food, Research | 11 Replies